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Axios

High-powered dark money group seeks to disbar 100+ Trump election lawyers

Lachlan Markay – March 7, 2022

A dark money group with ties to Democratic Party heavyweights will spend millions this year to expose and try to disbar more than 100 lawyers who worked on Donald Trump’s post-election lawsuits, people involved with the effort tell Axios.

Why it matters: The 65 Project plans to begin filing complaints this week and will air ads in battleground states. It hopes to deter right-wing legal talent from signing on to any future GOP efforts to overturn elections — including the midterms or 2024.

• The group takes its name from a count of lawsuits that sought to invalidate the 2020 results.

Details: David Brock, who founded Media Matters for America and the super PAC American Bridge 21st Century and is a Hillary Clinton ally and prolific fundraiser for Democrats, is advising the group.

• Advisory board members include former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.); and Paul Rosenzweig, a conservative and member of the Federalist Society who was former senior counsel for Ken Starr’s Clint0n-era Whitewater investigation and served in George W. Bush’s Department of Homeland Security.
• Former Utah Supreme Court Chief Justice Christine Durham; and Roberta Ramo, the first woman to serve as president of the American Bar Association, are also members.
• The project was devised by Melissa Moss, a Democratic consultant and former senior Clinton administration official.

The other side: Some of the lawyers targeted describe the tactics as naked political intimidation.

• “This move is nothing more than a desperate attempt by leftist hacks and mercenaries…” Paul Davis, a Texas attorney targeted for his presence at the Capitol on January 6, wrote in an email to Axios.
• He described an effort “…to neutralize anyone on the right with the ability to stand in the way of the left’s efforts to hide malfeasance in the 2020 elections and to clear the path for a repeat of similar malfeasance in the 2022 mid-terms.”

How it works: The 65 Project is targeting 111 attorneys in 26 states who were involved to some degree in efforts to challenge or reverse 2020 election results. They include lawyers at large national law firms with many partners and clients and lawyers at smaller, regional firms.

• It will air ads in battleground states, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
• It also will push the ABA and every state bar association to codify rules barring certain election challenges and adopt model language stating that “fraudulent and malicious lawsuits to overturn legitimate election results violate the ethical duties lawyers must abide by.”
• It plans to spend about $2.5 million in its first year and will operate through an existing nonprofit called Law Works.

Brock told Axios in an interview that the idea is to “not only bring the grievances in the bar complaints, but shame them and make them toxic in their communities and in their firms.”

• “I think the littler fish are probably more vulnerable to what we’re doing,” Brock said. “You’re threatening their livelihood. And, you know, they’ve got reputations in their local communities.”

What they’re saying: “With great power comes great responsibility. Lawyers have a special role in and special obligation to society,” Rosenzweig told Axios in an email.

• “It is all the worse, then, when they use their special position to attack the foundations of the rule of law.”

The group has three categories of targets, according to plans reviewed by Axios.

• Trump’s legal inner circle, including lawyers such as campaign hands Jenna Ellis and Boris Epshteyn and post-election lawyers like Sidney Powell and Joe DiGenova.
• Lawyers who signed on as “alternate electors,” who planned to submit their names to the Electoral College in lieu of legitimate elector slates if Trump-aligned legal challenges succeeded.
• Licensed attorneys who participated in or were present at the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Between the lines: Some of the attorney targets already have been hit with bar complaints. One going after Georgia attorney Brad Carver for his role as an alternate elector was dismissed for lack of evidence. Carver, in an email to Axios, reiterated his position that his involvement was legally appropriate.

• But The 65 Project is focused on starving any future efforts of legal talent as well as focusing on 2020.
• “This is mostly important for the deterrent effect that it can bring so that you can kill the pool of available legal talent going forward,” according to a person involved with the effort, who asked to remain anonymous.

Cleta Mitchell, who resigned from Foley & Lardner as she assisted the Trump campaign’s post-election legal efforts, characterized The 65 Project’s effort as hypocritical.

• “I’m betting Marc Elias isn’t on the list,” she said in a text message, linking to a story about the Democratic attorney’s challenge to the results of a House race in Iowa last year and one about his claims of voting machine “irregularities” in another in New York.
• “Ok for Dem lawyers to file election challenges. Of course.”

John Eastman, who crafted a legal memo detailing Trump’s options for overturning the election, already is facing a bar complaint in California.

• He “expects the Bar’s investigation into these matters will fully exonerate him from any charges,” his attorney said in an emailed statement.
• “As was his duty as an attorney, Dr. Eastman zealously represented his client, comprehensively exploring legal and constitutional means to advance his client’s interests.”

NBC News

‘A major breaking point’: Echoes of the Cold War reverberate in the West’s standoff with Russia

Dan De Luce and Abigail Williams – March 6, 2022

The United States and its allies are girding for a long-term confrontation with Russia, a contest of wills reminiscent of the Cold War, triggered by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, current and former U.S. and European officials say.

With Putin showing no sign he is ready to pull back Russian troops shelling Ukrainian cities, and with the United States and Europe vowing to arm Ukrainian forces and wage unlimited economic warfare on Russia, there is no end in sight to the emerging duel between the West and Russia.

“I think we are going to have to face it as something that we’re going to have to deal with for quite some time and be quite resolute and creative about confronting it,” said Eliot Cohen, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, who served in George W. Bush’s administration.

As in the Cold War, countries are being forced to choose sides in a clash that President Joe Biden and European leaders describe as a struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, between the rules-based order set up after World War II and the “law of the jungle” where might makes right.

“Any nation that countenances Russia’s naked aggression against Ukraine will be stained by association,” Biden said in his State of the Union address last week.

His speech carried echoes of past presidents during the Cold War, who also vowed to lead the “free world” against the threat from Moscow. And Biden’s top diplomat, Antony Blinken, also employed similar rhetoric that recalled the Cold War years.

“With this brutal invasion, we, our European allies and partners and people everywhere are being reminded of just how much is at stake. Now, we see the tide of democracy rising to the moment,” Secretary of State Blinken said on Friday in Brussels.

Mary Elise Sarotte, a historian of the U.S.-Soviet conflict who recently published the book “Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Stalemate,” said she is stunned by how quickly the ground has shifted in a matter of days, and the many parallels with the Cold War.

“It’s kind of shocking how fast this has happened. This new Cold War has ramped up really quickly,” Sarotte, who is a professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, said. “This is a major breaking point in history.”

After Russia launched its attack on Ukraine, European leaders rallied in a united front, marking a historic shift. Germany and other European governments recast their foreign policies to begin sending weapons to Ukraine and enact unprecedented sanctions on Russia that would have been unthinkable two weeks ago.

Unlike the Cold War, Moscow cannot rely on a large bloc of countries in its camp, or a communist ideology that had resonance for many around the world who saw it as an attractive alternative to capitalism or colonialism.

The wild card is how China will respond as the crisis drags on. So far, Beijing seems ready to support Russia and to buy its fossil fuels. But economic sanctions could force China to choose between trading with the developed world, or trading with an isolated Russian economy, some analysts say.

Putin’s Russia is arguably in a weaker position than the former Soviet Union, and unlike its economically closed predecessor, vulnerable to international sanctions, experts said.

A campaign of intense economic pressure against Russia is a distinguishing feature of this new showdown with Russia, an option that could not have worked against the old Soviet state that was mostly closed off from global markets.

“There wasn’t anything we could really do during the Cold War that was going to really punish the Russian economy. Well, now there is,” Cohen said.

Even so, Russia is “unquestionably dangerous, and it’s unquestionably deeply malevolent,” he added.

The Cold War emerged more gradually than the current crisis, and over time the two sides developed de facto codes of conduct and, eventually, elaborate arms control treaties, according to Sarotte.

But the current standoff represents uncertain territory without mutually accepted “rules of the game,” and a volatile Russian leader ready to flout international norms.

“There were times during the Cold War that were more stable than we see today,” said Thomas Wright, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution think tank.

“This feels like a very dangerous moment, especially given the personality of Putin. That might be the biggest difference” between the current crisis and the U.S.-Soviet contest, Wright said. “So much of this seems to be about Putin personally.”

Putin almost certainly will retaliate for the sweeping financial sanctions imposed against Russia, Wright said.

“I don’t think he is just going to let our response unfold on our terms,” he said. “He’s likely to try to escalate and put pressure on us.”

Not since the Soviet Union dissolved has the world had to contemplate the unthinkable, a potential clash between the world’s foremost nuclear superpowers.

“This is clearly an unprecedented situation,” said Tara Drozdenko, director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “I can’t think of another event other than the fall of the Soviet Union in my lifetime that has been so consequential when it comes to nuclear weapons.”

Despite the current tensions, Drozdenko said it’s crucial the two superpowers renew arms control talks to lower the risk. The New START treaty, the sole remaining arms control agreement between the U.S. and Russia, expires in 2026.

The presence of U.S. and Russian forces in close proximity around Ukraine raises the risk that an accident or miscalculation could spark an armed conflict between NATO and Russia. To try to avoid an unintended clash, the Pentagon announced Thursday it had set up a hotline between U.S. and Russian military top brass to “deconflict” forces in the area.

“You could imagine all kinds of ways in which this could get out of hand and suddenly become a NATO-Russia confrontation,” said Michele Flournoy, former undersecretary of defense in Barack Obama’s administration. “And in that instance, if that escalates, then the nuclear shadow becomes much more real.”

After the U.S. and the E.U. unveiled punishing financial sanctions on Russia following the start of the Russian invasion, Putin announced he had put his nuclear forces on alert.

Russian military doctrine openly embraces the idea of “escalating to de-escalate,” promoting the idea of invoking the nuclear arsenal to force an adversary to back off.

“I think this is the first time we’re seeing Putin actually put it into practice,” said Flournoy, now co-founder and managing partner of WestExec Advisors, a consulting firm.

Instead of responding in kind, the Biden administration made it clear the United States was not placing the nuclear deterrent forces on higher alert, and even canceled a scheduled test launch of a Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile to make it crystal clear that Washington was not interested in escalating nuclear tensions.

In what could be a long struggle ahead, Sarotte said, the U.S. would do well to draw on the lessons of the Cold War, including the need to support resistance fighters against troops sent from Moscow.

Historians say the U.S. won the Cold War by containing the Soviets, building a more prosperous economic model and by cultivating a vast network of alliances.

To prevail against Putin’s Russia also will require maintaining solidarity among allies, even when the economic blowback from Moscow inflicts some pain at home, former officials said.

“The main thing is, you just have to steel yourself for what’s going to be a long, difficult time,” Cohen said. “That’s not something that comes completely naturally to us. We would rather things that were short, decisive, get it over with and move on to the next thing. Well, that’s not going to be our world, and we just have to accept that.”

Insider

Russian ‘brain drain’ of academic, finance, and tech workers ‘might be the most important problem’ for its economy, experts say

Jason Lalljee – March 6, 2022

• Economists say more educated, middle-class Russians are likely to leave over Western sanctions.
• They’ve been leaving for years, and their exodus will likely hurt the country’s economy.
• One economist says Russia may resemble Iran, whose economy has been crippled by sanctions.

It’s not a question of whether people want to leave Russia, Oleg Itskhoki, an economics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Insider. It’s a matter of when they will — and whether they can.

“People want to leave in mass quantities now, but there are severe restrictions on mobility as a result of sanctions,” he said, citing “closed embassies, closed skies for flying.”

“So, in fact, fewer people will be able to leave even if more people are trying harder to leave now,” he added. “This is particularly relevant for educated, informed people.”

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last week, Western countries enacted a wave of sanctions that left Russia isolated and financially restricted. Foreign governments have even left Russians physically isolated: At least 33 foreign airlines have stopped flying to Russia, and most European countries have prohibited Russian planes from entering their airspace.

That’s as thousands of Russians have fled the country in the past week, The Telegraph reported. Most of the people leaving are those who can afford to, including Russia’s well-educated urban middle class. But the country has barred its citizens from leaving with more than $10,000 in tow, in an attempt to keep them — and their money — homebound.

It’s a problem that’s plagued Russia for years: The country’s “brain drain” is its mass emigration of highly trained and highly educated citizens to new regions, particularly Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and the US. As of 2019, as many as 2 million people had left Russia since Vladimir Putin became president, and many are entrepreneurs, creatives, and academics, the Atlantic Council, an international-affairs think tank, found.

Economists told Insider Russia’s military action against Ukraine — and subsequent Western sanctions — was going to make this problem worse in the long term. And brain drain, along with general isolation, is likely to dramatically reverse the country’s advancements from recent years, they said.

“In the long run, brain drain might be the most important problem for Russia,” when it comes to its economic future, Nikolai Roussanov, an economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told Insider.

Foreign institutions will likely leave Russia — and young, wealthy people may follow them

It’s too early to see the influence of the latest Western sanctions on Russian brain drain, Roussanov said. But he added that it was inevitable for the exodus that began in the past few years to ramp up.

“We’ve seen a slow trickle over the last decade of people leaving,” he said, adding that it would “accelerate, especially as foreign academic institutions break off their relationships with Russian ones — tech, finance, too.”

Roussanov and Itskhoki said young Russians who work in these industries would simply follow foreign institutions out of the country to continue their collaborations, also influenced by their opposition to war.

“Educated people do not like living in a dictatorship with censorship and other limitations of basic human rights, and this results in brain drain,” Itskhoki said.

Their departure will compromise the health of the Russian economy, Roussanov said.

Brain drain “will, of course, have extremely negative consequences on the human capital of the country, which drives growth through innovation and creation,” he said, adding that it would also “reduce consumption demand because these are the people that do a lot of consumer spending, and they will not support that once they leave.”

Isolation and brain drain could make Russia unrecognizable

Itskhoki said brain drain was not Russia’s “most acute” problem.

But it “is indeed a catastrophe in many different ways, an economic catastrophe being only one of them,” he said, adding that the country’s economy was also worse than it was just 20 years ago.

“There was zero economic growth on average over the last 12-plus years, and fewer and fewer opportunities for young people,” he said. “Younger cohorts were being disproportionately squeezed out and did not have the opportunities that people did during the first decade of the 2000s.”

Itskhoki said the nature of Russia’s invasion of a neighboring European democratic country was why government sanctions and company departures had been so immediate and widespread. This positions Russia for “economic, political, academic, cultural, and other isolation of the type we have not really seen,” he said, adding that Russia could in the near future resemble Iran, whose economy Western sanctions have crippled.

“This would be incredibly costly and painful for ordinary Russians,” Itskhoki said. “The duration of this isolation can be decades.”

Business Insider

US says Russia is recruiting Syrian fighters to aid in the Ukraine invasion and help take Kyiv: report

Kelsey Vlamis – March 6, 2022

• US officials told The Wall Street Journal that Russia was recruiting Syrians to fight in Ukraine.
• One official told the outlet some Syrians were already in Russia preparing.
• Fighters from the US and the UK have also joined the war to fight on behalf of Ukraine.

The US says Russia is recruiting fighters from Syria to aid in its invasion of Ukraine, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.

The Journal cited four US officials as saying Moscow was interested in Syrians with experience in urban combat who might help Russian forces take Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital and largest city.

It’s unclear how many Syrian fighters have been recruited or whether any have already been deployed to Ukraine, though one official told The Journal some were already in Russia preparing.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the Journal report.

Russia has been operating in Syria since 2015, when it launched a military intervention to help the Syrian government fight rebels in the country’s civil war.

Deir Ezzor 24, a media outlet based in Syria, reported last week that Russia was offering $200 to $300 for Syrian mercenaries willing to go to Ukraine for six months to “operate as guards.” The outlet said Russia was contracting Syrians who fought in Libya’s civil war. Reuters reported in 2020 that Russia had hired hundreds of Syrian mercenaries to fight in Libya.

Foreign fighters have also joined the war on behalf of Ukraine. Days after the full-scale Russian assault began, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced the creation of a foreign legion for anyone wanting to fight Russia in Ukraine.

British and American veterans are among those who have traveled to the country. Ukrainian officials said last week that 3,000 Americans had applied to fight. Several hundred arrived in Ukraine as of last week, Military Times reported.

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